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Kissy Poo

Kissy Poo: AKA The Cloaca Kiss

People find the term “Cloaca Kiss” both delightful and disgusting, usually depending on what they just ate. For those like me who never really cared how birds reproduce, but then one day was asked and felt stupid, I’ll tell you what someone told me: birds have one hole. One big, dirty, busy hole which handles all of their various excretory and reproductive functions. I’m not sure if the hole or the tube is technically the Cloaca, but that’s what we’ll call the whole thing.

To fertilize the female’s egg with the male’s sperm, you need contact. Hence, the Cloaca Kiss, or if you prefer the proper scientific term I recently made up, “Kissy Poo.”

Birds are not too bright and have not yet figured out how great it feels to lie around on your back on the beach all day. So instead, they have to pull a crazy maneuver of standing on top of each other to execute a proper Kissy Poo. The Cloaca Kiss is the big finale of this nutsy balancing act, and it’s tough to tell sometimes when it is successful and when it isn’t. But judging from his firm, kung-foo grip, their tightly wrapped tails, and both of their enormous grins, I’d say they nailed it!

What makes this a particularly noteworthy Kissy Poo is that the wind was blowing about 25 MPH out of the West, as it has been for a few days here, when they pulled this off. That’s AMOYzing.

It lasted for but a brief moment, but this just could be the beginning of an itty-bitty AMOY. Nice.